hief staple of
instruction.

It is during this stage that education, whether at private or public
schools, exercises its strongest levelling influence. Little attention can
be paid at large schools to individual tastes or talents. In Germany--even
more, perhaps, than in England--it is the chief object of a good and
conscientious master to have his class as uniform as possible at the end
of the year; and he receives far more credit from the official examiner if
his whole class marches well and keeps pace together, than if he can
parade a few brilliant and forward boys, followed by a number of
straggling laggards.

And as to the character of the teaching at school, how can it be otherwise
than authoritative or dogmatic? The Sokratic method is very good if we can
find the _viri Socratici_ and leisure for discussion. But at school, which
now may seem to be called almost in mockery {~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER OMICRON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH OXIA~}, or leisure, the true
method is, after all, that patronized by the great educators of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Boys at school must turn their mind
into a row of pigeon-holes, filling as many as they can with useful notes,
and never forgetting how many are empty. There is an immense amount of
positive knowledge to be acquired between the ages of ten and
eighteen--rules of grammar, strings of vocables, dates, names of towns,
rivers, and mountains, mathematical formulas, etc. All depends here on the
receptive and retentive powers of the mind. The memory has to be
strengthened, without being overtaxed, till it acts almost mechanically.
Learning by heart, I believe, cannot be too assiduously practised during
the years spent at school. There may have been too much of it when, as the
Rev. H. C. Adams informs us in his "Wykehamica" (p. 357), boys used to say
by heart 13,000 and 14,000 lines, when one repeated the whole of Virgil,
nay, when another was able to say the whole of the English Bible by rote:
"Put him on where you would, he would go fluently on, as long as any one
would listen."

No intellectual investment, I feel certain, bears such ample and such
regular interest as gems of English, Latin, or Greek literature deposited
in the memory during childhood and youth, and taken up from time to time
in the happy hours of solitude.

One fault I have to find with most schools, both in Engl